


Any Old Place, on Earth, in Space

by fab_ia



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Gen, exploring relationships with the addition of daemons to the whole deal, starts in s3 and goes from there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-19 08:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29871762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fab_ia/pseuds/fab_ia
Summary: '“The gang’s all here,” Kepler says. “I even brought a peace offering for you, if he’d like to step forward and… stop using Jacobi here as a shield. Please.”“Is that - Doug?”“Doug,” he says. “Hey there, commander."'or, more simply: sécurité onwards, and the characters have dæmons.
Relationships: Daniel Jacobi & Warren Kepler & Alana Maxwell
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title taken more-or-less from ‘boat drinks’ by jimmy buffett

The man Kepler had found half-dead in a shuttle which could only generously be known as anything other than _literally falling apart_ comes to late in the afternoon on eight days since he was brought aboard, with a sudden gasping breath that only serves to send him directly into a coughing fit. Impassively, one leg crossed over the other as he leans against the wall in the corner of the medbay, Jacobi watches as his chest heaves for a few moments before his breathing returns to something almost-normal, albeit panicked as his gaze darts around. It’s a shame - he’d been halfway conscious as Kepler had carried him in, and there’d been some hope he’d remember at least that. No dice, clearly. 

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Jacobi says dryly, fighting back the smirk as the man locks eyes with him - staying silent, it seems, had been the best course of action to give him a heart attack, his frenzied glancing around the room having glossed over him entirely. “Great to have you back with us in the land of the living.”

He and Maxwell had debated whether or not they should try to convince him he’d made it to the afterlife by having their dæmons hide somewhere and aiming for their most angelic smiles, but Kepler had put his foot down with a firm _no_ before the plans had come to any sort of fruition. 

“Besides,” he’d said a little later, “I’m sure the _afterlife_ would know his name, and the two of you have just been calling him ‘freeloader’ since we found him.”

Said freeloader coughs again, looking slightly panicked as he rests a hand on his throat, before pointing at it.

“You’d been breathing nothing but frost for a while,” Jacobi says, pausing for a moment as he makes a valiant attempt to recall what Kepler had said as he methodically stripped off and redressed the guy, right at the beginning. “Before we found you, that is. Plus, you’ve been unconscious for about a week.”

“Uh?”

“Wow,” Jacobi says, “I am definitely not the person you want in the room when you wake up. You - stay there. I’ll be back. Maybe. _Someone’ll_ be back.”

In all honesty, he thinks as he walks out, making sure to hold the heavy door open for Neith to pass through just before him and bare her teeth as she does, he’s pretty sure the freeloader won’t actually be able to even hold himself upright right now without any great difficulty. He knows _he_ didn’t want to walk the last time he spent any kind of extended period of time in bed, and that wasn’t even as a result of being injured - he’d just been comfortable and content.

“Neith,” he says, “who d’you think, Kepler or Maxwell.”

Neith gives him a _look._

“Right,” he says, “Kepler.”

The problem with that plan is _finding_ Kepler, who seems to be skilled in the art of both being the center of attention at all times and vanishing into the shadows as soon as it’s unnecessary to have everyone’s eyes on him. Blending in is a skill he’s perfected over the years and it never fails to impress Jacobi, considering everything about the man - tall, handsome, loud, and with a big dæmon to boot - adds up to someone impossible to look away from. 

All of that only matters when he doesn’t want to be found, of course, and Jacobi finds him in his quarters, settled comfortably atop his neatly-made bed with his dæmon somehow fitting beside him, her tail idly swishing from side to side. He’s fairly sure she’s purring as Kepler scratches behind her ear with one hand, holding a book open with the other and not bothering to look up as Jacobi raps his knuckles against the doorframe as he leans into the room. 

“Afternoon, sir,” Jacobi says.

The only response he gets is a hum as Kepler turns the page - not, Jacobi thinks, that there’s any way he’s actually reading it, the way he’s holding it, and he’s probably just using it so he has an excuse as to why he’s absent-mindedly petting his dæmon. Jacobi can’t entirely blame him, looking at her fur and considering how thick and soft he looks. It makes it hard to get his attention, so he clears his throat and tries again.

“He’s awake,” he says. 

_“Really,”_ Kepler says, finally looking up, his eyebrows raised. “That’s interesting. I thought he’d be out another few days, at least.”

“He woke up and immediately started coughing,” Jacobi says as he screws up his face. “And then I think he almost had a heart attack when I said ‘hi’. Which is just _rude,_ honestly.”

“Yes,” Alekto says, her voice muffled where her head rests on her paws, tail curling in on itself for a moment in a betrayal of amusement. “How very rude.”

Neith does a bad job of concealing a laugh and Jacobi sighs, leaning more of his weight against the doorframe as Kepler turns a page in his book. “Can you come and, I don’t know, give him a rundown on what happened, how we found him, all that shit?”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“You’re better with people than I am,” Jacobi huffs. “Plus, you probably remember everything about how we found him. I was just impressed he didn’t die.”

 _Also,_ Jacobi decides not to say, _I kinda want to see him shit himself when he sees Alekto for the first time._

Kepler shoots him an unimpressed look anyway, one that makes Jacobi reasonably sure he knows his ulterior motive, as Alekto half-jumps from the bed. She stretches out as he does much the same, sighing as his ankles both crack and he starts to follow behind Jacobi. A glance down reveals their dæmons staying side-by-side and Alekto leaning to headbutt Neith’s side as they do. Kepler grins, wraps an arm around Jacobi’s shoulder, and presses him against his side for a moment before releasing him. The touch is familiar - Kepler’s always been tactile and comfortable with things like that since the first day Jacobi met him and after clarifying that he was comfortable with it - and it clears a little of the unease he feels at the idea of a stranger encroaching upon _their_ space. 

Freeloader is still there, unsurprisingly, when they reach the room he’s squirreled-away in, a conspicuous bulge in the front of his shirt where his dæmon is clearly trying to hide against his stomach, out of sight and making a valiant attempt to stay out of mind. Kepler’s dæmon is very much _in_ sight, though, and the panic that crosses the freeloaders face when he sees her is comical, to the point where Jacobi’s tempted to take a picture both for his own amusement and to share with Maxwell. 

“Good evening, stranger,” Kepler says, a wide smile on his face as he spreads his hands out, gesturing around himself. “Welcome to the _Urania!”_

“U...rania?” the freeloader asks. 

“Prettiest ship I’ve ever known,” Kepler says, wiping a fake tear from his eye. “I hope you don’t mind that we brought you aboard. You just looked - a little lost at sea, heh, and it’s always nice to help someone out when we get a chance. And if you were already dead or didn’t end up making it well, hey, there’s some fresh meat for a week’s meals!”

Jacobi’s starting to think he should be prepared to retract his earlier statement about Kepler being good with people.

“I… you… found me?”

“Lost at sea,” Kepler says again, a little wistful. By the grace of - someone, _something_ \- he doesn’t launch into one of his hour-long stories but the temptation is clearly there.

 _Long story short,_ Jacobi thinks, _that’s how I became captain of a ship and turned a desert island into a thriving farming community!_

“We found you, brought you on board, got you warmed up and as comfortable as we could get you without you actually telling us if you were in any sort of pain or injured anywhere,” Kepler says. “It definitely seemed like more than your usual run-of-the-mill dehydration and malnourishment, considering the… freezer burn. Impressive you survived out there on your own! It was a few months, right?”

“About that,'' the freeloader agrees, wincing as he speaks. “Got, uh, rough. _Hard.”_

“I’ll bet,” Kepler says, dropping his voice to something lower and softer as he eyes him in the way he knows is unnerving and employs purely as an intimidation tactic. It only works on the people that don’t know him, because Jacobi can recognise the fact he’s genuinely impressed. “It’s pretty damn impressive, though. Most people would’ve died.”

“Yeah,” the freeloader says. “Nah. Not me. Never me. We should be so lucky.”

 _Oh, joy,_ Jacobi thinks, sharing a look with Neith that confirms his suspicion - they’re both tired of this guy already, and he’s been awake for half an hour. _Another fucking pessimist._ Maxwell, he’s sure, will be thrilled.

“Right,” says Kepler. “Well. I’ve got some questions I can only hope you’ve got answers for, and I’m sure you’ve got questions of your own for me. Equivalent exchange.”

“Want me to stick around, boss?” Jacobi asks, even though he has no real intention of doing so unless Kepler actually wants him to. 

For a moment Kepler pauses, the pantomime of consideration and weighing up his choices before he hums and shakes his head, dragging the chair Jacobi had been sitting in earlier on closer to the bed and sitting down on it, one hand in the fur atop Alekto’s head as she lets out a low and pleased noise. 

“No,” Kepler says, “no, I think we’ll be just fine.”

Jacobi makes sure to get one more glimpse of the freeloader’s panicked face before the door swings shut behind him.

“So what you’re telling us,” Maxwell says later, in a position similar to Jacobi’s earlier on that day, back pressed against one of the mess room’s walls, “is that he’s the one that went missing from the _Hephaestus?_ The station we’ve been heading towards this whole time after that SOS message?”

“Yes,” Kepler says.

“More to the point, he’s the, quote, semi-incompetent communications specialist stroke lab rat?” Jacobi asks, tapping one finger against his chin. 

“More or less,” Kepler says.

 _Yikes,_ Jacobi thinks, and glances over at Maxwell to see something similar written across her own features, Galileo curling himself around her neck to rest his head against her cheek as she meets Jacobi’s gaze for a second before they both look back at Kepler. Kepler who, as usual, has a frustratingly unreadable expression that most people would only bother to recognize as calm but the two of them know to be something much more conflicted. They’ve joked about making a note of everything - _“a dictionary to Warren Kepler’s microexpressions,”_ Neith had suggested - and every day the thought of a catalog grows more appealing than having to commit every tightened corner of his lips to memory in order to get a read on what he’s _actually_ feeling. 

Alekto’s tail is curled up under herself, though, which is usually a given that there’s something Kepler isn’t bringing up. It might just be that she’s attempting to stay warm, but the air isn’t exactly cold.

“So he’s the whole reason we’re on the way there,” Neith says. 

Kepler smiles, tight. “More or less.”

 _Fuck,_ he’s insufferable sometimes. Maxwell snickers anyway, tilting her head to one side, hair hiding most of her dæmon’s body from sight as she glances down at Alekto and back up to Kepler’s face.

“Did he tell you anything interesting?” she asks. 

Kepler sighs. “That depends on what you think qualifies as interesting,” he says. “Eiffel was - for some reason he seemed _scared,_ what a pity. Told us about the others out there, though - Minkowski, Hilbert, Hera. And, uh, one of the old members of a crew from years ago. Lovelace.”

“Lovelace,” Alekto repeats, “who we thought was _dead.”_

That doesn’t seem good, Jacobi’s happy to admit, and scratches under Neith’s chin as she lets out a pleased noise. That’s probably what Alekto was so uncomfortable with, that subversion of the _natural order,_ and the fact that what’s usually a concrete fact has proven itself to be just as uncertain as everything else in the world. While Kepler’s own morality tends to fall solidly in a _gray area,_ having clearly defined concepts to work with helps him - do something, probably. Analyzing his approach to things isn’t what Jacobi gets paid to do, and tends just to give him a headache. 

“You think they’ll be happy to get him back?” Maxwell asks. “I mean, the SOS they sent out did sound like they missed him at least a little.”

“Frankly,” Kepler says, “I don’t know _what_ these people are gonna think when we get there. I can make a guess, but there’s nothing certain.”

“Well, shit,” Jacobi says, and nobody’s going to tell him not to swear when it’s what they’re all thinking anyway.

When he hears the knocking the next day, his watch saying it’s a little after twelve-thirty, it’s too timid to be either Kepler or Maxwell, which means the only option left is that it’s the freeloader - Eiffel - disturbing what was supposed to be a few hours of peace and quiet without any real responsibilities. Neith whines, pressing her nose against his thigh as her ear twitches.

“Make him go away,” she says. “He can fuck _right_ off.”

“I don’t think you know how funny it is to hear you swearing,” Jacobi says, looking back down at his book for a second before sighing and folding down the corner of the page he’s on. “Guess we’d better figure out what the hell he wants, huh?”

“He wants a damn good _bite,”_ Neith mutters, baring her teeth and not bothering to move as Jacobi gets up and flicks her on the top of her head before he tugs the door open and Eiffel almost falls into his chest, only just managing to get his balance back and backing away a few steps, eyes wide and panicked once again.

Jacobi’s starting to assume that ‘panic about everything to ever exist, ever’ is Eiffel’s default reaction to things happening in his life, judging by everything he’s seen from the man so far.

“Ah!” Eiffel makes a noise that might honestly be a squeak. “Um - hello! Hello?”

“Hello,” Jacobi says. “Did you want something? I was in the middle of something indescribably important.”

“I…” Eiffel trails off. Looks behind him, before wrapping his arms around himself a little tighter, clearly hugging his dæmon to his chest. “I was - being here is - I got - I still don’t know what’s happening, I barely know where I am and I don’t know who _any_ of you are and I just - needed to see another person.”

“Why didn’t you go look for Kepler?” He only asks out of genuine curiosity - Kepler had probably at least acted nice when he was talking to Eiffel the day before, while Jacobi hadn’t bothered to hide outright hostility the second he’d seen him wake up.

Eiffel pales, screwing his face up. “He’s - scary.”

That, Jacobi figures, is fair enough. Eiffel’s likely heard all the stories about people with dæmons like Kepler’s, how they’re ruthless monsters - all of the usual stereotypes - and considering he doesn’t know anything about the man himself or his dæmon, he probably believes them. 

“Right,” Jacobi says. “I mean, what, you want me to tell you where we’re going?” Off Eiffel’s nod, he sighs. “I mean, back out to the Hephaestus. We logged - I don’t remember if it was actually an SOS or just a message that something had gone tits-up out there. We were on our way out that way when we found you and ‘cause Kepler’s a nice guy, he brought you here.”

“Are they… are they still alive?”

It’s almost tragic, the note of hope in his voice. It almost makes Jacobi feel bad for how he’s probably about to crush it and grind it into the dirt. _Almost._

“We don’t know,” he says. “Nobody’s heard anything from them since then. They’ve gone completely dark.”

“Right,” Eiffel says, voice even softer. “Well. Thanks for - telling me, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Jacobi says, “no worries.”

* * *

The _Hephaestus_ looks much the same as the last time he’d been there - maybe a little more ragged, maybe looking a little more as though large parts of it are likely to fall off and into the star at any given moment, but largely unchanged. 

The first glimpse they got of it had Eiffel gasping and averting his eyes immediately, clutching a little tighter to his dæmon's fur - a ferret, curling up a little more in his cupped hands - as he takes a sharp breath in. 

“Poor man,” Alekto murmurs, her head close enough to Kepler’s ear he’s sure that he’s the only one to hear her speak at all. “Resilient. Scrappy. A survivor.”

“Well, he’s definitely all of those,” Kepler murmurs back. They don’t address the thought of _weakness_ that hangs in the air because, despite knowing the stereotypes around dæmon types largely mean nothing, they’ve never fully been able to shake the association of _small_ with that idea _._ Alekto huffs, her breath warm against his skin, and he closes his eyes. 

Eiffel isn’t a coward, necessarily, but he’s not exactly showing any overwhelming feats of bravery, given his wariness to even be in the same room as Kepler or Maxwell - much to Jacobi’s chagrin and Maxwell’s endless amusement. 

_Flighty, jumpy little motherfucker,_ Jacobi had deemed him, sulking by the window in the navigation center and looking out at the darkness beyond the glass. _He should be just as scared of me as he is you, y’know._

 _Yes, yes, you’re terrifying,_ Kepler had said. He’d managed not to smile until his face was out of Jacobi’s line of sight, but he’s certain Alekto’s amusement had been clear in the way she was holding herself. Neith had noticed, at least, and shot her best glare in their direction. 

“You ready to act scary, darling?” Kepler murmurs, running a hand through Alekto’s fur and taking care to scratch the spot behind her right ear he knows she likes. “They won’t be expecting _us,_ that’s for sure.”

“The only people that aren’t scared of me are idiots,” she says, despite how she’s leaning her head into Kepler’s touch. He decides not to resent the fact she doesn’t exclude him from that count. It doesn’t include Jacobi or Maxwell either because Jacobi likes to point out that she lets Kepler use her as a scarf and he’s seen Kepler use her as a pillow, and Maxwell had given him one look the first time they met and asked him if he thought that his dæmon was meant to intimidate her while Galileo had given him a look he now knows as disapproving but had been hard to read at first. Snakes aren’t the most expressive creatures, which he’d thought was only a stereotype until learning that they were just painfully subtle with how they showed feelings.

Their first onto the station is met with the cocking of a gun and, when Kepler raises an eyebrow, the woman in front of him scoffs and lifts it higher, square in the center of his chest.

“Ah,” Kepler says, “Renee Minkowski, I presume. You can put the gun down, we’re unarmed.”

That’s a lie, but she doesn’t need to know it. He knows for a fact he’s got both a gun and a knife hidden beneath his clothes and that Jacobi’s likely in a similar state, except with something a lot more _incendiary_ involved.

“Who the hell’s asking?” she says, narrowing her eyes.

“That’s a yes to the name,” Kepler says, amused. “My name is Warren Kepler - I’m with Goddard, and it’d be nice to shake your hand if you’d put down the firearm.”

“Okay,” Minkowski says, “but why are you - why are you _here?”_

 _Give me strength,_ Jacobi mumbles behind him, under his breath, before he raises his voice for her, and the others with her, to hear. “We heard this was the hot holiday destination this year,” he says. “Who _wouldn’t_ want to be out in the middle of deep space? I know I’m here for a nice tan.”

“Daniel Jacobi,” Kepler says, gesturing at him as Alekto wraps herself around his legs, pressing her weight against his shins to ensure the three other figures get a good look at her. “Our delightfully sarcastic ray of sunshine, and my right-hand man.”

“Aw,” Jacobi says, almost cooing, “you’re so sweet, sir.”

Yes, Kepler knows.

“We’re here to help you,” Kepler says, fighting for a softer smile than his usual, slightly-unnerving baring of teeth. “You, Doctor Hilbert over there, and… ah, a new recruit? I don’t believe we’ve had the honor of being acquainted before.”

He knows exactly who she is, though. Isabel Lovelace - the dead woman walking, who they’d all believed to have died years ago, swallowed up by the star after her shuttle had broken off from the station, but looks very much alive and well in front of him. Hardly even charred, really, just with something burning in her eyes and her dæmon giving him and Jacobi a similar glare. Impressive.

“Captain Isabel Lovelace,” she says, folding her arms over her chest and looking him up and down. Her gaze lingers on Alekto for a few long moments, who looks right back at her, one side of her mouth curling up to bare her canines. “I was part of a _previous_ crew sent up here. I’m the only one who survived.”

Yes. Kepler remembers reading the report and considering shoving Hilbert out of an airlock and watching him choke and die - all the potential he’d wasted for no progress with his own projects, with _nothing_ to show for his time out there except for blood on his hands and other people’s half-finished research. Kepler despises him more than he knows how to put into words. 

“Charmed,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain. And then… there’s Hera, isn’t there? Unless you’d prefer to be called something else - 214, Census Unit-”

“Oh,” the voice from the overhead speakers comes, a little staticky and shaky, glitching - surprised, clearly. She seems as though she’s used to being forgotten. “Oh, um - yes. Hera. I mean - I prefer Hera.”

Maxwell had told him that would be the case. Her advice, as ever, is excellent.

“The gang’s all here,” Kepler says. “I even brought a peace offering for you, if he’d like to step forward and… stop using Jacobi here as a shield. Please.”

Predictably, Eiffel whimpers, but Jacobi shoves him forward anyway - Alekto steps away and rubs her head against Kepler’s leg - and Minkowski doesn’t stop herself gasping, covering her mouth as she looks at him.

“Is that - _Doug?”_

Her voice shakes. Eiffel nods, ducking his head for a second before he looks up with a weak smile. 

“Doug,” he says. “Hey there, commander. Captain. Hera. Doc. I - yeah, not dead. Not dead at all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> list of dæmons (added 10/3/21 because I only just remembered how to add single-chapter notes)
> 
> Kepler: snow leopard, Alekto  
> Maxwell: coral snake, Galileo  
> Jacobi: black-backed jackal, Neith  
> Eiffel: ferret, Carina  
> Minkowski: german shepherd, Casmir  
> Hilbert: bearded vulture, Ekaterina  
> Lovelace: great horned owl, Oberon


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i.. finally remembered how to add chapter-specific notes so there’s a list of all the dæmons that are relevant right now at the end of the first chapter 😅

The rotational axis Goddard has developed over time is a godsend - Jacobi’s not certain how he would have coped on the _Hephaestus_ without it, given Neith’s slightly awkward size and form, a combination that doesn’t exactly lend itself to being _huggable,_ let alone easy to carry. If he didn’t know better he would assume Kepler would face a similar challenge but, given his penchant for letting his dæmon lay across his shoulders like a scarf, he’s sure that he’d find some way to be comfortable with the whole ordeal. Kepler seems to be able to find something he’s content with in the vast majority of situations, he’s fairly sure, especially when it comes to his own comfort. 

It’s something else that’s consistently infuriating about him, but also amusing, especially all the times either he or Maxwell have glanced over to his bed in the middle of a sleepless night on a mission to see him and his dæmon curled up together - on one especially memorable occasion, because Maxwell had dared to take a picture, him using her as a pillow. It’s a good picture, Kepler’s dark hair mostly standing out against Alekto’s white fur, but blending in with the spots across her sides; his eyes are closed and his face is relaxed as he dozes. He can understand it, at least, because Alekto’s fur looks _soft,_ looks like a hand would just sink into it. Neith would probably threaten to bite him if he even considered using her as a pillow. 

Still. None of that really matters because his bunk on the _Urania_ is as comfortable as it can be - if a little smaller than he’s used to - and he’s only just got himself out of it and dressed when Kepler pulls him into a storage room. Maxwell, already waiting, gives him a look as bewildered as he feels as he frowns at her, mouthing _what now_ to her as Kepler squints at the disconnected speaker set into the ceiling above the door before he locks it. 

“The crew of the _Hephaestus,”_ he says slowly, drawing the words out, anger in every syllable, “are idiots.”

“We knew that, though,” Neith says. Her voice is flat. “Isn’t that one of the first things you told us about them?”

With a sigh, Kepler nods. “I did tell you that,” he says, “but I don’t think any of us could have predicted just _how_ idiotic they are. Have you visited labs two-through-four and greenhouse three yet, any of you?”

“Nah, not yet,” Jacobi says, “I was busy checking what Eiffel had done to the comms equipment.”

“I was patching some of the… glaring problems with Hera’s code relating to the sensors up near the observation deck,” Maxwell says, wincing a little at her own hesitation. “I don’t know what Hilbert did to her, but…”

“Ah, yes,” Kepler says, ignoring Alekto’s scoff. “The man of the hour. Doctor Hilbert.”

 _“Cockroach,”_ she hisses. “He’s a rat.” 

Kepler clicks his tongue in a way that would probably make other people go stiff with terror but that Jacobi knows as a noise that means _I’m pretending to disapprove of something someone said even though I actually think it’s amusing or entirely agree with it but I have appearances to keep up._ It’s a sound that Jacobi’s grown familiar with over the years of working with him, having heard it directed at both him, Neith, and Kepler’s own dæmon at various points in time. 

“Doctor Hilbert,” he says, “has spent some of his _valuable research time_ aboard this station making a _semi-sentient goddamn plant_ instead of doing something constructive. A plant. Which is dangerous. And has taken over _all_ of those rooms I mentioned earlier.”

There were a lot of things Jacobi expected Kepler to say, there. Maybe Hilbert had caused a gas leak or had stored a whole load of dangerous chemicals incorrectly. Maybe there was - a sample that got exposed to air when it really shouldn’t have been and that those rooms were on lockdown because of an airborne pathogen or some kind of toxic gas.

A plant monster was at the bottom of the list.

“Wow,” Neith says. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” Maxwell says. “What she said.”

“Oh, believe me,” Kepler says, “if I knew any more, I would tell you all of it.”

The crew of the _Hephaestus_ seem unbothered by the existence of the giant plant, considering the fact they hadn’t mentioned it at any point or offered an explanation as to why those rooms are unused outside of Hilbert’s shrug as he said “are just extra right now, no need to use them”. He wonders whether Kepler’s more bothered by the fact they’re content to live with a potentially dangerous lifeform or the fact Hilbert was just outright lying to his face. Most likely it’s some combination of those two and, frankly, Jacobi can’t wait until it comes back to bite Hilbert.

Maxwell pulls a face. “Did they at least seal off the air vents so it couldn’t spread to the rest of the station?” Her tone makes it seem like she doubts it, which is - reasonable, Jacobi figures. Given their penchant for avoiding any kind of real safety protocol, it won't come as a surprise if they haven't.

Alekto scoffs again, quickly coming close to the most derisive Jacobi’s ever known her to be. He should probably be more scared of a pissed-off snow leopard than he is, all things considered, but that image has mostly been shattered over the years on account of Kepler’s tendency to treat her like she was a regular tabby. “Who knows? We only found out it _exists_ because of Eiffel being too scared of us to lie.”

“Weird,” Jacobi says, “most people take one look at you and go ‘aw, she’s so fluffy, she can’t be dangerous’.”

“A sensible person looks at us and thinks ‘oh, that’s an apex predator, we’ll stay out of their way’,” Kepler says.

“We could be sensible if we put our minds to it,” Maxwell frowns. “There’s just no point when it’s only us together. We know each other.”

“My life is made worse because of it every single day,” Kepler says. He runs a hand through his hair. “Alright. I think the first thing to get out of the way here is the crew evaluations. Yes?”

“Yes, sir,” Jacobi says.

“Tell us where to go and what to do, sir,” Maxwell says.

* * *

With Minkowski sequestered away in a corner of the ship with unfinished navigation logs she’s definitely going to resent him for making her do - given the way Casmir had barely been holding back a snarl, Kepler’s sure it’s going to be a pain in the ass at some point soon - he resolves to at least play nice with Lovelace. Lovelace, who looks at him like she’s somewhere between begrudgingly impressed at something he’s done and as if she’s weighing up the best way to kill him at any given moment. Knowing what he knows about her, her train of thought is probably a little more skewed towards the latter and he can’t even blame her for it. If anything he can respect her for it and if they were anywhere else at all, it might border on admiration.

“You know,” he says as he turns another page in her file and eyes the words written there, “it didn’t exactly hit me until right now just how long you’ve been up here orbiting the star outside that window, Captain. One thousand, one hundred, and eighty-three days.”

“Been a while,” she says.

“I can’t imagine it’s all been sunshine and rainbows. Any way in particular that you’d like to characterize your time out here?”

Lovelace pauses, turning to meet her dæmon's gaze for a moment as something tightens at the corner of her mouth. “Difficult,” she says. As he raises an eyebrow, she lifts a hand, shakes her head. “No-no, no. _Very_ difficult. That’s the one.”

It’s hard not to laugh at that. _Difficult is an understatement,_ he thinks, and a glance down at Alekto confirms her thoughts are likely along those same lines. Her whole first crew dead, mostly at the hands of a man she’s doing an impressive job of not killing, returning to the same rustbucket years later to find things playing out the same way once again - sure. Difficult. 

“It does say here that you’re funny,” he says, resting his finger under the words as he reads. “‘Candidate is very funny’. Young liked you a lot. The most she’s ever said about one of _my_ jokes is ‘try a little harder next time, Kepler’. She just gives me disappointed looks now.”

“That’s because your jokes aren’t funny,” Alekto cuts in, up on her hind legs to rest her front paws in his lap. “It’s because _you_ aren’t funny.”

 _Ouch,_ Kepler mouths, and looks up at Lovelace again. She looks unimpressed and unamused, and it strikes him that she likely knows exactly what he was doing - his attempt to make himself seem more on her level, as though he’s just as much of a regular person as she is. Not necessarily a lie, but a difference from how he’s presented himself thus far, and he finds himself impressed by her again. She’s under no illusions as to the things he’s willing to do.

“I assume,” Kepler says slowly, “that there’s a good reason you don’t want to go into any detail about your time up here?”

“I think it’s a pretty good one, yeah,” she says, also leaning a little closer to him. Her dæmon’s talons dig into the shoulder of her shirt. “It’s not as though me telling you anything is going to make you any more likely to lend me your ride home, even if I ask really, _really_ nicely.”

Kepler’s always liked bravery and Lovelace, now, is being _incredibly_ brave, almost to the point of being overly bold. She’s grinning, teeth bared, not quite reaching her eyes and so he mirrors it. Alekto growls, low enough Kepler isn’t certain it would be audible at all to anyone not right next to her, while the owl on Lovelace’s shoulder only stares. He thinks there’s anger behind those eyes, somewhere. The bright yellow of them is, at least, unnerving.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he says, and closes her file without looking back at it. “Do you know what you are right now, Captain? A complication. You’re making my life _very_ difficult right now. No official role or responsibilities, you’ve just - turned up and made a nuisance of yourself. You’re nothing but an unknown variable, and I hate that.”

Grin lost now, Lovelace frowns at him from her seat across the table he’d gestured for her to take a seat at earlier when they’d first come into the room. Her wariness is obvious and he prides himself on doing something unexpected and managing to catch her off-guard like this. Her dæmon clicks his beak, and Kepler smiles.

“Do you like chess, Captain?” he asks, leaning back in his seat and eyeing her.

Caught off-guard, Lovelace frowns. “Do I - chess?”

“Chess,” Kepler says with a nod. “Would you like a game? Do you prefer black or white?”

“I’m not -”

“I’ll take white, then,” he says and turns to pull down the chessboard from the wall, disengaging the magnets built into the board in case of a flaw in the rotational gravity system. Alekto leans up to eye the board, her paws on the edge of the table before she drops down again, pressing her head against his knee. 

A game, then. They’ll work with this.

“Your move,” Lovelace says, and he grins again.

* * *

“So,” Jacobi drawls, tapping his nails against the side of one flask and deliberately making a point of ignoring Hilbert and Ekaterina’s simultaneous frustrated noise, “what’s this one, Doc?”

“That,” Hilbert says slowly as though he’s talking to a child, “is potassium alum. Potassium aluminum sulfate. Is used for water purification and -”

“Uh-huh,” Jacobi says, shaking it from side to side.

Hilbert’s lab is cluttered in a way Jacobi would define as ‘organized chaos’, if he was the one in charge of the space, but as a result of it belonging to the other man he’s made the decision to class it as ‘an absolute shithole’ instead. He might be acting more antagonistically than he has any real need to, playing up the ignorance he’s sure the man sees in him as he plays the fool and asks questions he already knows the answer to - things he’s known the answer to since he got a good look at the things he’s bringing up. Hilbert, he knows, much like the rest of the _Hephaestus_ crew, has no idea what he’s actually got a degree in or all the intricacies of his work. His chemical engineering diploma gleams at the back of his mind and he sets one flask down to pick up another, turning it over in his hands and holding it down lower to the ground for Neith to inspect too. One of Hilbert’s fists clenches.

 _“Liquid halothane,”_ he hisses, and Ekaterina flaps her wings in what Jacobi assumes is badly-concealed anger at his presence in a space the two of them view as _theirs._ “If you would put it down, I would be happy to -”

Jacobi hums, sitting it back down on the worktop and raising an eyebrow as he looks over at Hilbert. “I,” he says, “don’t think you’re in any sort of position to tell me what to do, Hilbert. You haven’t been second-in-command on this mission for a long time, you should really be used to this by now. And - don’t hold out hope for getting any of that authority back, either.”

“That is not - I am - I submitted a full inventory of my laboratory to Colonel Kepler only hours after he asked for it, and it is all _perfectly accurate.”_

The report he’d submitted may well contain everything in his laboratory - Jacobi’s sure Hilbert wouldn’t dare try to slip something past Kepler in case the man had come to inspect his workplace himself instead of sending one of his ‘lowly underlings’ to do it - but Jacobi knows it hadn’t mentioned the apparent existence of the sentient plant monster Kepler’s immensely bothered by. So much so that he’d already planted enough charges to, hopefully, blast the whole thing to hell or high water when Kepler gives the order and Maxwell’s severed Hera’s links to the rooms that’ll be affected. 

In all truth, Kepler had only bothered to give Hilbert’s report a cursory glance-over before handing it off to Jacobi, willing to defer to his expertise in the area.

“Make sure to tell me if he’s planning to kill us all immediately,” he’d said, and Jacobi had beamed as he offered a salute, already flicking through the clearly hastily-written pages. “I’d hate for _him_ to catch us off-guard.”

Which is why Jacobi’s got his incredibly-official clipboard and his spacefaring pen - which Maxwell had given him as a birthday gift at some point and he’d thought would be hilarious to bring with him to actual space - and he’s going through the list to cross off every listed chemical in the slowest and most infuriating way he possibly can. Being irritating when he needs to be is something he prides himself on and the fact his and Neith’s mere presence in the lab are bothering Hilbert and his dæmon is just an added bonus.

“Oh, this looks fun,” he says, picking something up and turning it over in his hand. “What’s it do? Could I borrow it?”

“No,” Hilbert says. “That is a bioelectrical pulse oximeter and is very - it is extremely fragile! If you would put it -”

Jacobi tightens his grip and ignores the pain as the edges dig into the skin of his palm, cracks spider-webbing across the glass surface and leaving the display unreadable.

“-down,” Hilbert finishes.

“Oops,” Jacobi says.

“Do you have nothing to do except go through hazardous chemicals, fragile instruments, and interrupt my dangerous and delicate work?”

“Well, they don’t look all that hazardous,” Jacobi says. “Do they, Neith?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “If we were stupid, we’d say the bright blue one did, but it looks to me more like it’s just a copper sulfate solution.”

“Looks like it is,” Jacobi says. “Sure hope that container of hydrochloric acid over there isn’t leaking, ‘cause then you’ll have a real problem. Yeesh, Doc. You should figure out some better ways to store some of this stuff - I can get you a copy of the advice on it, if you need them.”

For a moment Hilbert does nothing but stare at him as Jacobi meets his gaze, keeping it level even as Ekaterina flaps her wings before she mutters something he’s sure is a curse in a language he thinks is either Russian or, possibly, Polish - definitely not a language he speaks outside of saying his name and asking for directions to the nearest bathrooms or hotel, at any rate. Hilbert shakes his head, brushing his hands off on his lab coat.

“What,” he starts before cutting himself off and shaking his head. “You - are a chemist?”

“Oh, nah, nope,” Jacobi says, waving a hand in the air. “Didn’t your crewmates tell you? I’m just a really big science nerd. Look, my shirt’s got an atom on it, that proves I’m a real nerd!”

It isn’t even his shirt, or at least he’s fairly sure it isn’t. There’s a vague memory of him having given it to Maxwell for her birthday one year, although ownership of it seems to trade between them - but he had taken it from her quarters that morning. It was either that or another equally-annoying one that she’d given _him,_ declaring ‘science is magic that works’.

“You are an incredibly unpleasant man,” Hilbert says.

“I know,” Jacobi says, cheerful. “But you should be careful who you talk to like that. Say that to the wrong person and they might be offended.”

“You are infuriating.”

“Doctor Hilbert, flattery gets you nowhere.”

“Could go through a whole thesaurus and not manage to fully encapsulate how incredibly -”

“Oh, now, now,” Jacobi says, “you’re one to talk. What is it people say, ‘takes one to know one’?”

Privately, he’s wondering if he could rile Hilbert enough to goad him into getting violent, although it doesn’t seem as though he’s really the type to resort to that. He seems more likely to just shove a needle into his carotid and flood his body with whatever neurotoxin he’s made up in his downtime as the _Hephaestus’_ resident evil scientist. Jacobi glances down at the page he’s got folded down, frowns, and turns it over until he gets to the one he’s been searching for.

“I think we should talk about your experiments now,” Jacobi says. “Man, these are so illegal it makes some of the stuff I’ve done look like community service. Look at us, huh? Just two criminals bonding over the horribly illegal things we’ve done. Maybe we’re going to be friends - you could probably use some friends, come to think of it. Looks like… only three or four of the people you’ve worked with in the past decade and a half are alive, though, so maybe I’ll have to rescind that offer. Sure looks like your idea of a good birthday present is a whole load of napalm.”

He decides not to mention that he wouldn’t usually have a problem with that.

“Oh no,” Hilbert says, pushing a notebook in his direction over the worktop. “What a shame that is.”

“Such a shame,” Jacobi agrees easily. “So tell me about these, hm, these _experimental subjects.”_

Hilbert glares at him again but begrudgingly starts to talk, although there’s a hint of venom in every word mixed with a morbid pride. Feigning disinterest, Jacobi glances down and notices that Neith clearly harbors the same dislike for Hilbert that he does himself, which he can understand. He was getting tired of Hilbert feeling like he had some kind of control over the situation and relishes the fact that he can lord the reversal over him like he is.

* * *

As she turned to leave the room, Kepler had reached out to tap her elbow twice - if she was Jacobi she’s sure he would have just taken hold of it - and looked her in the eye for a moment before he nodded. 

“Maxwell,” he said, “you’re good at ignoring people when you don’t want to acknowledge them, aren’t you?”

“That’s not always the case,” she said, “sometimes I actually get really distracted by work.”

“Sixty-forty,” Galileo added. Kepler only raised an eyebrow at the two of them, choosing not to comment on the admittance that they actively ignore comments people make to her.

“If I asked, would you be willing to ignore someone in the room with you while you got on with other things?”

“Oh, yeah,” Maxwell said. “Probably.”

“Absolutely.”

“Perfect,” Kepler said, and she knows him well enough to recognize it as her dismissal.

Doug Eiffel, it turns out, is easier to tune out than she’d really anticipated and his insistence on doing the survey he’d been given - with questions Maxwell herself had written and had a pretty good idea of what the answers would be - is _cute._ Or, at least, it would be if it meant he wasn’t talking so much. This is, after all, an evaluation of the _Hephaestus_ crew, and after five minutes she can already guess that the contents of Eiffel’s review will be ‘still absolutely shit-scared of Kepler for no real reason’. Perhaps for some reason, actually, since she’s not stupid enough to pretend he hadn’t threatened them when he’d taken that group on the _Urania_ the first day, but it doesn’t take away from the entertainment value of it.

“Um,” Eiffel says, “hello? Could we - _please_ \- get on with this synthetic crew review?”

“Sure,” Hera says. Maxwell only hums, adding a set of brackets to a line that she knows will flag as an error before immediately deleting them, catching Hera’s attention in a split-second. Eiffel had passed her a copy of the questions earlier on, unaware of the fact she’s got them memorised already, and he’s waiting for her to look down at it and bring it up.

From what she knows about him he isn’t exactly patient, but he’s staying quiet for now even as he shuffles closer in an attempt to get a look at what she’s typing. If Maxwell was anyone else she might attempt to hide the screen from him and keep her privacy, but there’s no way in hell he’s going to be able to read it.

“Um,” Eiffel says, “Doctor Maxwell?”

“Mhm?”

“Did you look over the questions - I - did you hear what I said?”

Maxwell bites down on the inside of her cheek. “Oh,” she says, “sorry. Was I meant to actually be paying attention to you? I was a little busy with what I was working on.”

“Right,” Eiffel says under his breath before he sits up again, wiping his palms off on his pants as his dæmon leans her head against his neck, “can we - could we get started on this review now, please? The, uh, this synthetic crew survey - can you _please_ stop typing?!”

“Not really,” Maxwell says, “I’m in the middle of something very important, actually. Hera, can you see that new pathway to the updated visual array?”

There’s a moment of hesitation - Eiffel looking pained out of the corner of Maxwell's eye as she pauses, fingers just barely lifted from the keys - as Hera weighs up her options between continuing to ignore Eiffel or going in search of the new systems Maxwell’s just installed for her. 

“Yes,” she says eventually, her voice shaking over the word as she does, “I see it just there. Is that - radio waves and - and a real-time map of -“

“Ionising radiation,” Maxwell says with a grin, switching the order of a few words around and frowning before she adjusts the parameter on one line. Galileo hisses, low, and she clicks her tongue. “Do you see how I’ve integrated it with the original radiographic censors here? It’s a neat little program, Goddard was - they were _very_ happy when I submitted it for use with their deep-space program. I don’t like to brag,” she lies, “but it might honestly be some of my best work in the past two years.”

Eiffel’s expression seems to grow even more distraught as she keeps talking, his grip on the pages growing tighter and tighter as he listens, occasionally glancing up to one of Hera’s cameras half-desperately while she keeps coming up with questions for Maxwell - who’s more than happy to show her _exactly_ what she means through demonstration. 

“Amazing,” Hera says, soft,” and Maxwell laughs. “No, I mean it, that’s brilliant. The code is…”

“Seamless? Thanks. Years of practice. Colonel Kepler doesn’t know the difference between this and _Python,_ and Daniel doesn’t know anything besides ‘hello world’, it’s been _so long_ since someone appreciated the finer side of what I do.”

“Uh, hello?” Eiffel says, waving a hand. “I’m still here, by the way! Waiting _very_ patiently for you to wrap up with that and get to this Kepler-ordered survey!”

 _Kepler-ordered and Maxwell-approved,_ Maxwell thinks and barely holds back a snort, eyeing one of the tabs in the corner of her screen. As if Kepler would consider doing anything even remotely related to AI without checking in with her first. He knows just enough about them that she wouldn’t intentionally lie to him about something important, but not enough that he would be happy to work with them directly on his own, especially while she’s there as an option. 

“Sounds thrilling,” she says, her voice intentionally flat as it comes out. Galileo laughs beside her ear, quiet and sibilant, while Eiffel and his dæmon - she’s not sure of her name, but it might start with a vowel - both bristle, the man’s lips turned down in an almost-comical while the ferret whines, claws digging into his shirt.

* * *

The slip of lined paper had gone mostly unnoticed during the rest of the afternoon, to the point that Hilbert only notices it when Ekaterina holds it out to him, the jagged edge where it’s been roughly torn out of a notebook gently shifting under the air vent in the laboratory. Even as he holds it between his fingers, he eyes it as though it’s liable to explode at any moment - a reasonable concern, he thinks, when it comes to Daniel Jacobi. He might not have _seen_ the carefully-constructed explosion, but he’d heard and felt it, a comms link with the others allowing him to listen in on the cold neutrality of Kepler’s voice and the soft alto of his dæmons as she’d asked for - demanded - silence. 

“Strange to have a dæmon speak up like that,” he says, frowning as he parses through enough of the handwritten note to understand it was a comprehensive list of every flaw Jacobi could find in his lab. His handwriting, somewhere between cursive and a hurried scrawl, is difficult to read, and part of him wonders if he’d usually opt to do this sort of thing with a computer and printer and did it by hand to make it even more frustrating. “Usually they are like you. Quiet.”

“Or Lovelace’s,” Ekaterina says, and he’s inclined to agree. Her dæmon hasn’t so much as opened his beak with the intention to speak or let a single sound escape him since the shuttle was seemingly devoured by the star. Come to think of it -

“Didn’t her dæmon used to be - smaller?” Hilbert asks, scratching his chin with a pen as he stares off and into nothing. Ekaterina nods and he hums, biting down on the end of the pen for a moment as he thinks. It isn’t as though a change in a dæmons form is completely unheard of or some undiscovered physical miracle.

”Never mind,” he decides, looking back down to the smudged page he’s been working from. “Should get the lab _up to standards_ before Kepler finds something else to bother us about.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kepler: snow leopard, Alekto  
> Maxwell: coral snake, Galileo  
> Jacobi: black-backed jackal, Neith  
> Eiffel: ferret, Carina  
> Minkowski: german shepherd, Casmir  
> Hilbert: bearded vulture, Ekaterina  
> Lovelace: great horned owl, Oberon


End file.
